Costume.—A dark purple sack coat, and knee-breeches; black hose, low shoes with bright buckles; coat lined with lavender satin, a frill of rich lace at the wrists and for tie-ends over a low turn-down collar, hair long, and parted in the middle, or all combed over. Enter with a circular cavalier cloak over the shoulder. The voice is clear, easy, and not forced. Change pose now and then, the head inclining toward the strong foot, and keep a general appearance of repose.
This disciple of true art speaks very deliberately, and … the closing inflection of a sentence or period is ever upward.20§
The essay which he read out was in contrast to his costume. Having won his audience’s attention with ostentation, he held it with surprising gravity. What he offered was not the rarefaction and preciosity of early Pater, but a reconsidered aestheticism. Instead of being languid it was energetic. By beautifying the outward aspects of life, he would beautify the inner ones. To disarm those who expected him to say what beauty was, he quoted Goethe in support of defining beauty by example, not by philosophical hairsplitting. The English Renaissance was, he said, like the Italian Renaissance before it, ‘a sort of new birth of the spirit of man.’ Under this rubric he could discuss the desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, the passion for physical beauty, the attention to form rather than content, the search for new subjects of poetry, for new forms of art, for new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments. The new Euphorion was, as Goethe had foreseen, the product of mating Hellenism and romanticism, Helen of Troy and Faust.
Wilde dealt largely with large matters. The French Revolution had compelled art to respect the facts of physical life, but those facts had proved suffocating. Against the dominion of facts the Pre-Raphaelites had gathered to make their protest. That the British public was unaware of these eminent artists had no bearing on the matter. ‘To know nothing about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English education.’ Nor did the fact that these artists were frequently the objects of satire detract in any way from their worth. He amplified what he had said at the performance of Patience: ‘Satire, always as sterile as it is shameful and as impotent as it is insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to genius.… To disagree with three fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity.’21
Some characteristics of the English Renaissance were difficult to document among most of the artists he named. He asserted without much justification that they celebrated form at the expense of content, being unconcerned with moral lessons or weighty ideas. (Pater in Plato and Platonism had pointed out that for Plato form was everything, matter nothing.) They were right, he said, because it was not new ideas, or old moral preoccupations, but the discovery of Parian marble that had made Greek sculpture possible, as the discovery of oil pigments had made possible the Venetian school, and that of new instruments had made possible the development of modern music. The Pre-Raphaelites were in reaction against empty conventional workmanship. It was the capacity to render, not the capacity to feel, which brought true art into being. And once in being, art conferred upon life a value it had not heretofore had. Its creations were more real than the living. As Swinburne had once remarked in Wilde’s hearing at dinner (at Lord Houghton’s), Homer’s Achilles was more real than England’s Wellington. Wilde was piecing together his later discovery that life imitates art.
Although at moments he implied, like Pater, that his renaissance was a recurrent phenomenon in history, at moments he insisted that the present awakening of the spirit was more thoroughgoing than its predecessors. Although it lacked the ‘divine natural prescience of beauty’ in Greece and Rome, it had a ‘strained self-consciousness’ which he did not disparage. It was essentially a Western phenomenon, even if some of its decorative patterns came from the East. He hoped that the Western spirit, so anxious and disquieted, might find rest in comely surroundings which could foster a fuller existence. Hence the importance of decorative art. ‘You have listened to Patience for a hundred nights and have listened to me for only one,’ he said. ‘You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the aesthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men. Well, let me tell you the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in England the most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art.’ On this note the lecturer drew towards his ringing conclusion. For his final sentence he adopted a mannerism of Pater’s, the interjection ‘Well!’: ‘We spend our days looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is art.’ He had disclosed it at last.
Paumanokides
It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.
The audience applauded warmly. Not all of them were pleased, some had been bored, but all recognized that they had been in the presence of something unaccustomed. Sam Ward praised Wilde for avoiding rhetorical tricks—a generous response to what others called a monotone. Wilde had lectured to them as much through rhythm and manner as through argument, heaping up cadences to make them imagine the beauty he did not define. The lecture was itself a diffusion of beauty, though a glib one. Afterwards there was a reception, and as Wilde moved into the drawing room, an orchestra struck up ‘God Save the Queen,’ an honor rarely accorded an Irishman. Perhaps it was here that a woman asked him how to arrange some decorative screens, and he replied, ‘Why arrange them at all? Why not let them occur?’22 Following the reception, Wilde was taken to a club. There some of the young men are supposed to have importuned him to sample earthly examples of that beauty which he had been diffusing on a more ethereal level. Wilde seems to have gone along to nighttown, and perhaps did what they proposed.23
He felt that he had started off well, and wrote to Mrs George Lewis, ‘I am sure you have been pleased at my success! The hall had an audience larger and more wonderful than even Dickens had.… I have several … secretaries. One writes my autographs all day for my admirers [he would say later that this one had had to go to the hospital with writer’s cramp], the other receives the flowers that are left really every ten minutes. A third whose hair resembles mine is obliged to send off locks of his own hair to the myriad maidens of the city, and so is rapidly becoming bald.… Loving virtuous obscurity as much as I do, you can judge how much I dislike this lionizing, which is worse than that given to Sarah Bernhardt I hear.’24 What he had succeeded in presenting was not so much precepts as a personality. That personality became the subject of vivid contention as he zigzagged impossibly across the country.
Wilde’s next lecture was scheduled for the Horticultural Hall in Philadelphia on 17 January. But he had another errand to carry out first. When he arrived at the Aldine Hotel in that city on the 16th, he was asked by a new batch of reporters which American poet he most admired. He replied without hesitation, ‘I think that Walt Whitman and Emerson have given the world more than anyone else.’ Longfellow, admirable as he was, was too close to European sources to have much effect in Europe. Wilde actually valued Poe, ‘this marvellous lord of rhythmic expression,’ above the others, but Poe was dead. ‘I do so hope to meet Mr Whitman,’ Wilde confided. ‘Perhaps he is not widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead. There is something so Greek and sane about his poetry, it is so universal, so comprehensive. It has all the pantheism of Goethe and Schiller.’25 Two of his friends, J. M. Stoddart and George W. Childs, both publishers, were planning parties in Philadelphia for Wilde, and both invited Whitman to come from Camden, New Jersey, and attend them. Whitman declined both invitations, but asked Mrs Childs to give Wilde ‘my hearty salutations and American welcome.’ On 18 January, however, perhaps after reading Wilde’s encomium in the press, he sent Stoddart a card, ‘Walt Whitman will be in from 2 till 3½ this afternoon, and will be most happy to see Mr. Wilde and Mr. Stoddart.�
�26
Stoddart, the publisher of the Savoyard operas, had become acquainted with Wilde in New York and had gone to the theatre there with him one evening. Now they drove companionably to Camden (Wilde Londonized it later to Camden Town). At this time Whitman was living with his brother and sister-in-law. The room they entered was one which Wilde praised for its fresh air and sunlight as the most impressive room he had entered in America. On the table stood an austere pitcher (‘cruse’ was Wilde’s term) of water. How the two worthies addressed each other rapidly became the subject of comic speculation. A parody by Helen Gray Cone in the Century magazine for November 1882 was close enough to the mark:
PAUMANOKIDES:
Who may this be?
This young man clad unusually with loose locks, languorous,
glidingly toward me advancing,
Toward the ceiling of my chamber his orbic and expressive
eye-balls unrolling?
NARCISSUS:
O clarion, from whose brazen throat,
Strange sounds across the seas are blown,
Where England, girt as with a moat,
A strong sea-lion, sits alone!
In humbler prose, Wilde initiated the conversation by saying, ‘I come as a poet to call upon a poet.’ Whitman replied, ‘Go ahead.’ Wilde went on, ‘I have come to you as one with whom I have been acquainted almost from the cradle.’ He explained that his mother had purchased a copy of Leaves of Grass when it was published; presumably this was in 1868 (Wilde put it two years earlier), when William Michael Rossetti edited a selection of Whitman’s poems. Lady Wilde read out the poems to her son, and later, when Wilde had gone up to Oxford, he and his friends carried Leaves of Grass to read on their walks. Whitman, in pleased response, went to the cupboard and took out his sister-in-law’s bottle of homemade elderberry wine. Wilde drained without wincing the glass that Whitman had filled, and they settled down to consume the rest of the bottle. ‘I will call you Oscar,’ said Whitman, and Wilde, laying his hand on the poet’s knee, replied, ‘I like that so much.’ To Whitman, Wilde was ‘a fine handsome youngster.’ Wilde was too big to take on his lap like other youngsters who visited the sage, but could be coddled if not cuddled.27
The bottle emptied, Whitman proposed that they go to his den, where they could be on what he called ‘thee and thou terms.’ The den was filled with dusty newspapers preserved because they mentioned Whitman’s name, and Wilde would complain later to Sherard of the squalid scene in which the poet had to write. It was hard to find a place to sit down, but by removing a stack of newspapers from a chair, Wilde managed to. They had much to talk about. Whitman was eager to know about Swinburne, who had long ago been his English advocate and had written the tribute ‘To Walt Whitman Across the Sea.’ Wilde knew Swinburne well enough to promise to relay Whitman’s message of friendship to him. Whitman presented Wilde with two photographs, one for himself and one for Swinburne, and Wilde promised to send him in return a copy of a photograph he had just had taken by Napoleon Sarony in New York. (There had been some twenty poses.) Wilde spoke of the young writers and artists who were forming a new renaissance. Whitman uneasily asked after Tennyson, whose ‘verbal melody almost always perfumed, like the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness,’ he greatly admired. ‘Are not you young fellows going to shove the established idols aside, Tennyson and the rest?’ Wilde would later deride Tennyson as ‘the Homer of the Isle of Wight’; he tried to reassure Whitman now. ‘Not at all. Tennyson’s rank is too well fixed and we love him too much. But he has not allowed himself to be a part of the living world and of the great currents of interest and action. He is of priceless value and yet he lives apart from his time. He lives in a dream of the unreal. We, on the other hand, move in the very heart of today.’28 Whitman could nod his approval of that last sounding phrase.
Wilde pressed his advantage to ask what Whitman made of the new aesthetic school. Whitman replied with an indulgent smile befitting his sixty-three years, ‘I wish well to you, Oscar, and as to the aesthetes, I can only say that you are young and ardent, and the field is wide, and if you want my advice, go ahead.’ With comparable politeness Wilde questioned Whitman about his theories of poetry and composition. Prosody was not a subject on which Whitman had ever been articulate, except in relentlessly extolling free verse. He responded with wonderful ingenuousness, ‘Well, you know, I was at one time of my life a compositor and when a compositor gets to the end of his stick he stops short and goes ahead on the next line.’ He went on unabashed, ‘I aim at making my verse look all neat and pretty on the pages, like the epitaph on a square tombstone.’ To illustrate, he outlined such a tombstone with his hands in the air. Wilde treasured the remark and the gesture, and re-enacted them to Douglas Ainslie some years later.29 But Whitman concluded with impressive simplicity, ‘These are problems I am always seeking to solve.’
So far all had been good cheer and substantial agreement. Wilde risked more dangerous ground when he declared, ‘I can’t listen to anyone unless he attracts me by a charming style, or by beauty of theme.’ At this the older poet remonstrated, ‘Why, Oscar, it always seems to me that the fellow who makes a dead set at beauty by itself is in a bad way. My idea is that beauty is a result, not an abstraction.’ This time Wilde took his turn in being concessive: ‘Yes, I remember you have said, “All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain,” and after all, I think so too.’
He shifted to a subject certain to be congenial, Whitman’s courage in flouting convention and resisting hostile criticism. The parallel with the hostile reception his own poems had received was apposite. For the moment Whitman’s example seemed to prove that America was freer than England, though only five months later a sixth edition of Leaves of Grass would be unexpectedly withdrawn because of a threat of prosecution for two of its poems. Wilde said, ‘You cannot conceive how doubly and trebly bound literature and art are in England. The poet or artist who goes beyond is pretty sure of a hard time. And yet there is a most determined class of the best people in England, not only among the young but of all ages, both men and women, who are ready and eager for anything in art, science or politics that will break up the stagnation.’ He pleased Whitman by praising the American masses as superior to the masses in England and Europe. The sentiment was not original, Whitman commented later, but it showed that Wilde had his wits about him.
After two hours of talk Whitman said, ‘Oscar, you must be thirsty. I’ll make you some punch.’ ‘Yes, I am thirsty.’ Whitman made him a ‘big glass of milk punch,’ Wilde ‘tossed it off and away he went,’ as Whitman recalled afterwards. But as he departed the old poet called out after him, ‘Goodbye, Oscar, God bless you.’ On the ride back to Philadelphia with Stoddart, who had played silent partner in these eager confabulations, Wilde unwontedly kept still, full of emotion at what he called ‘the grand old man.’ Stoddart, to lighten his mood, remarked that the elderberry wine must have been hard to get down. Wilde brooked no such criticism: ‘If it had been vinegar I should have drunk it all the same, for I have an admiration for that man which I can hardly express.’ The next time he was interviewed by a reporter, he said of Whitman, ‘He is the grandest man I have ever seen, the simplest, most natural, and strongest character I have ever met in my life. I regard him as one of those wonderful, large, entire men who might have lived in any age and is not peculiar to any people. Strong, true, and perfectly sane: the closest approach to the Greek we have yet had in modern times.’
It was like an eighteenth-century city poet praising a homespun shepherd. To Wilde, who shared Poe’s concern with ‘the fabric and cut of the garment,’ the verse of Whitman was all subject and no form. As he said of Whitman later, ‘If not a poet, he is a man who strikes a strong note, perhaps neither prose nor poetry but something of his own that is grand, original and unique.’ To Whitman, Wilde had the supreme virtue of being young, and ‘so frank and outspoken and manly.’ With him Wilde had discarded his affectations: ‘I saw behind the scenes,’ Whitma
n said. He defended Wilde against criticism: ‘I don’t see why such mocking things are written of him. He has the English society drawl, but his enunciation is better than I ever heard in a young Englishman or Irishman before.’ To one of his young friends, Henry Stafford, Whitman bragged, perhaps to make Stafford a little jealous, that ‘Wilde had the good sense to take a great fancy to me.’30 He particularly liked and quoted a remark Wilde made later in some Boston drawing room: ‘If I may presume to speak for them—to include myself among them—I should say, it is not your praise, your laudations, that we, the poets seek, but your comprehension—your recognition of what we stand for and what we effect.’
True to his promise, Wilde wrote off at once to Swinburne to convey Whitman’s friendly respect. A reply dated 2 February by Swinburne must have been composed and sent at once:
Oscar Wilde Page 24